He was deemed to have molested kids at NW Side parish, so why isn’t he on church lists of predator priests?

The Rev. John Baptist Ormechea lives in one of the most picturesque parts of Rome in a centuries-old monastery buffered by gardens and overlooking the ancient Colosseum.

A member of a Catholic religious order the Passionists, Ormechea was moved into the Rome complex in 2003 not for its contemplative setting but, according to the order’s province that includes Chicago, “because all the residences in the province had youth programs or were in a parish setting.”

From the late 1970s to the late 1980s, Ormechea served at Immaculate Conception parish on the Far Northwest Side.

Then, in the early 2000s, several men came forward, saying that, as boys at Immaculate Conception, they were sexually abused there by Ormechea.

The accusations were deemed by church authorities to be credible, which meant Ormechea had to be away from children. He also could have faced criminal charges if the statute of limitations for filing such charges hadn’t expired, the Chicago Sun-Times found.

Such misconduct is exactly the kind of information that, in the wake of yet another national scandal over abusive priests, Cardinal Blase Cupich in Chicago and others in the American Catholic church hierarchy have said the public has a right to know.

Cupich maintains a public list, posted online, of abusive diocesan priests — clerics who worked under his authority or that of his predecessors overseeing the Archdiocese of Chicago.

But you won’t find Ormechea on Cupich’s list. That’s because it doesn’t include abusive clerics who, like Ormechea, belong to the Passionists or any of the other semi-autonomous religious orders, whose operations extend far beyond the boundaries of a single diocese.

You could find out about the allegations against Ormechea that his own order deemed to be credible if the Passionists maintained a similar public list of its clerics.

Many other orders do, encouraged to do so by Cupich, who for years has asked Catholic religious orders that operate within his jurisdiction of Cook and Lake counties to come clean about abuse allegations against their clerics. Such publicly accessible lists of abusers and their assignments would help fill in the gaps that his own list leaves.

But the Passionists haven’t done that.

Neither Cupich nor his top aides would comment. A Cupich spokeswoman previously has said he has left it to the orders to make public any information about their problem priests because they have the best information about them.

Cupich has been collecting detailed information, though, on abusive order priests who have ever worked in the geographic territory that he oversees for Pope Francis or who were found to have abused anyone here, the Sun-Times reported in February. But the cardinal has declined to make that information public even though he posts the same type of information about predator priests who worked under his authority.